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In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer across the northern United States. The recent publication of his groundbreakingNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slavehad incited threats to his life, however, and to place himself out of harm's way he embarked on a lecture tour of the British Isles, a journey that would span seventeen months and change him as a man and a leader in the struggle for equality. In the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles Douglass's 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected Douglass--from its wild landscape (\"I have travelled almost from the hill of 'Howth' to the Giant's Causeway\") to the plight of its people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans. Writing in theSan Francisco Chronicle,critic David Kipen has called Chaffin a \"thorough and uncommonly graceful historian.\" Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin's new book makes Douglass's historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals how the former slave's growing awareness of intersections between Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life. The experience accelerated Douglass's transformation from a teller of his own life story into a commentator on contemporary issues--a transition discouraged during his early lecturing days by white colleagues at the American Anti-Slavery Society. (\"Give us the facts,\" he had been instructed, \"we will take care of the philosophy.\") As the tour progressed, newspaper coverage of his passage through Ireland and Great Britain enhanced his stature dramatically. When he finally returned to America he had the platform of an international celebrity. Drawn from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other primary-source documents--many heretofore unpublished--this far-reaching tale includes vivid portraits of personages who shaped Douglass and his world, including the Irish nationalists Daniel O'Connell and John Mitchel, British prime minister Robert Peel, abolitionist John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln. Giant's Causeway--which includes an account of Douglass's final, bittersweet, visit to Ireland in 1887--shows how experiences under foreign skies helped him hone habits of independence, discretion, compromise, self-reliance, and political dexterity. Along the way, it chronicles Douglass's transformation from activist foot soldier to moral visionary.

Soon after winning the presidency in 1845, according to the oft-repeated anecdote, James K. Polk slapped his thigh and predicted what would be the \"four great measures\" of his administration: the acquisition of some or all of the Oregon Country, the acquisition of California, a reduction in tariffs, and the establishment of a permanent independent treasury. Over the next four years, the Tennessee Democrat achieved all four goals. And those milestones—along with his purported enunciation of them—have come to define his presidency. Indeed, repeated ad infinitum in U.S. history textbooks, Polk's bold listing of goals has become U.S. political history’s equivalent of Babe Ruth’s called home run of the 1932 World Series, in which the slugger allegedly gestured toward the outfield and, on the next pitch, slammed a home run. But then again, as Tom Chaffin reveals in this lively tour de force of historiographic sleuthing, like Ruth's alleged \"called shot\" of 1932, the \"four measures\" anecdote hangs by the thinnest of evidentiary threads. Indeed, not until the late 1880s, four decades after Polk’s presidency, did the story first appear in print. In this eye-opening study, Tom Chaffin, author, historian, and, since 2008, editor of the multi-volume series Correspondence of James K. Polk , dispatches the thigh-slap anecdote and other misconceptions associated with Polk. In the process, Chaffin demonstrates how the \"four measures\" story has skewed our understanding of the 11th U.S. president. As president, Polk enlarged his nation's area by a third—thus rendering it truly a coast-to-coast continental nation-state. Indeed, the anecdote does not record, and effectively obscures complex events, including notable failures—such as Polk's botched effort to purchase Cuba, as well as his inability to shape the terms of California's and the New Mexico territory's admission into the Union. Cuba would never enter the federal Union; and those other tasks would be left for successor presidents. Indeed, debates over the future of slavery in the United States—debates accelerated by Polk's territorial gains—eventually produced perhaps the central irony of his legacy: A president devoted to national unity further sectionalized the nation’s politics, widening geopolitical fractures among the states that soon led to civil war. Engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, Met His Every Goal? —intended for general readers, students, and specialists—offers a primer on Polk and a revisionist view of much of the scholarship concerning him and his era. Drawing on published scholarship as well as contemporary documents—including heretofore unpublished materials—it presents a fresh portrait of an enigmatic autocrat. And in Chaffin's examination of an oft-repeated anecdote long accepted as fact, readers witness a case study in how historians use primary sources to explore—and in some cases, explode—received conceptions of the past. Soon after winning the presidency in 1845, according to the oft-repeated anecdote, James K. Polk slapped his thigh and predicted what would be the \"four great measures\" of his administration: the acquisition of some or all of the Oregon Country, the acquisition of California, a reduction in tariffs, and the establishment of a permanent independent treasury. Over the next four years, the Tennessee Democrat achieved all four goals. And those milestones—along with his purported enunciation of them—have come to define his presidency. Indeed, repeated ad infinitum in U.S. history textbooks, Polk's bold listing of goals has become U.S. political history’s equivalent of Babe Ruth’s called home run of the 1932 World Series, in which the slugger allegedly gestured toward the outfield and, on the next pitch, slammed a home run. But then again, as Tom Chaffin reveals in this lively tour de force of historiographic sleuthing, like Ruth's alleged \"called shot\" of 1932, the \"four measures\" anecdote hangs by the thinnest of evidentiary threads. Indeed, not until the late 1880s, four decades after Polk’s presidency, did the story first appear in print. In this eye-opening study, Tom Chaffin, author, historian, and, since 2008, editor of the multi-volume series Correspondence of James K. Polk , dispatches the thigh-slap anecdote and other misconceptions associated with Polk. In the process, Chaffin demonstrates how the \"four measures\" story has skewed our understanding of the 11th U.S. president. As president, Polk enlarged his nation's area by a third—thus rendering it truly a coast-to-coast continental nation-state. Indeed, the anecdote does not record, and effectively obscures complex events, including notable failures—such as Polk's botched effort to purchase Cuba, as well as his inability to shape the terms of California's and the New Mexico territory's admission into the Union. Cuba would never enter the federal Union; and those other tasks would be left for successor presidents. Indeed, debates over the future of slavery in the United States—debates accelerated by Polk's territorial gains—eventually produced perhaps the central irony of his legacy: A president devoted to national unity further sectionalized the nation’s politics, widening geopolitical fractures among the states that soon led to civil war. Engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, Met His Every Goal? —intended for general readers, students, and specialists—offers a primer on Polk and a revisionist view of much of the scholarship concerning him and his era. Drawing on published scholarship as well as contemporary documents—including heretofore unpublished materials—it presents a fresh portrait of an enigmatic autocrat. And in Chaffin's examination of an oft-repeated anecdote long accepted as fact, readers witness a case study in how historians use primary sources to explore—and in some cases, explode—received conceptions of the past.

Now comes the latest hokum from America's militia: Timothy McVeigh, as it turns out, was a mere patsy in a vast conspiracy by the federal government to blow up its own buildings in Oklahoma City. Unsubstantiated charges of conspiracy are poisoning and trivializing our nation's public debates. From Dallas' grassy knoll to the sun-bleached desert of Nevada's Area 51, we inhabit what is increasingly becoming a geography of distrust and paranoia. Sadly, Rep. Key's irresponsible charge against the federal government typifies an increasing tendency of too many public figures in America to put ideology and shoot-from-the-hip guesswork ahead of factual integrity. Rep. Key joins a growing list of public figures who, in recent months, have shilled for equally groundless conspiracy theories. We've heard Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) insist that the CIA lurks behind America's crack epidemic. President John F. Kennedy's former press secretary, Pierre Salinger, meanwhile, claims that a U.S. missile took out TWA's Flight 800. We've heard Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) charge that the Department of Interior plans to hand over the nation's parks to the United Nations. At least give the conspiracy-obsessed credit for a certain symmetry: With the parks under UN control, all those black UN helicopters, imagined so vividly by Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), will have a place to land.

With each new explosion in America, commentators trumpet the arrival on our shores of terrorism once thought consigned to other climes: Deadly acts of sabotage, once exclusively associated with places like Beirut, Belfast and Bogota, we read, have infected Liberty's empire. The Los Angeles Times recently noted that pipe bombs like the one that rocked Atlanta's Olympic park last summer have been \"popular for decades among Middle Eastern terrorists.\" Martin Medhurst, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University, made the point more explicitly. \"I think terrorism has come to America,\" he told the Chicago Tribune. \"It has been going on in Europe for two decades or more. This is not the end. This is just the beginning.\" True to our nation-state's Anglo-Saxon origins, with its legalistic preoccupations, our view of America's past often focuses on contracts, laws and treaties. From the Mayflower Compact to the Louisiana Purchase, from the 1954 Geneva Accords to the North American Free Trade Agreement, we are ever obsessed with the variants of our social contract. Likewise, the wars--the acts of violence--that we recall most vividly are the ones fought pursuant to those legal documents. And with the exception of the Civil War and the various Indian wars, every U.S. war since the War of 1812 has been fought on foreign shores--thus nourishing the idea that wars, too, are a kind of violence that happens someplace else.